More like we stand on piles of broken shit. A lot of "hard" things in programming have very little fundamental complexity. They are hard because at some point in time someone made a compromise that no longer is relevant or makes any sense. It is possible to redesign those things to be simple, but modern developers are conditioned to fight this at every step. The idea that the first thing you should try to do when faced with extraordinary complexity is to bypass it is completely alien to people whose daily jobs consist of continuously banging their heads against convoluted frameworks and deficient APIs.

Time handling is a great example. Until you get into general relativity, time itself is extremely simple and uniform. But human representations of time are extremely convoluted, because historically they are based on astronomy. Here is the kicker: 99.99% of all software has nothing to do with astronomy, and yet people chose to inject those complexities in core structures that track time. (For example, Unix timestamps have leap seconds, which is a source of innumerable bugs and ridiculous convolutions in code to prevent those bugs.)